Ti West closes his trilogy with a Hollywood slasher that gets 1985 right in every shop window and never finds a story to walk down the street. Mia Goth is as fierce as before; the film around her is thin, and it is not frightening.
Ti West’s third film with Mia Goth picks up Maxine Minx six years after the Texas farmhouse of X, in Los Angeles in 1985. She is making adult films and has decided that is beneath her, so she auditions for The Puritan II, a horror sequel directed by Elizabeth Bender (Elizabeth Debicki), and gets it. Then a private investigator in a stained suit (Kevin Bacon) starts following her, people she knows begin turning up dead, and the city is already on edge because a serial killer is loose in it. That is the film, and it is the best-looking of the three and the thinnest.
Eliot Rockett shoots Hollywood Boulevard at night in a soft grain with the neon running pink and green into the wet road, and the daytime scenes flat and bleached, so that the whole thing looks like a tape found in the back of a video shop. Jason Kisvarday builds the peep-show booths, the video store where Leon (Moses Sumney) works, and the studio lot, and every sign and poster on every wall is correct. Mari-An Ceo dresses Goth in leather, denim and shoulders. Tyler Bates gives it a synthesiser pulse, and West drops a period song on top whenever a scene needs a lift, which is often.
Goth is the reason to go. She has played this woman across two films now and has found something new in her: a cold patience, a look that measures a room for what it can give her and dismisses whoever cannot help. The audition scene, a monologue delivered in close-up and held for what feels like a full minute without a cut, is the best thing in the film, and it held us completely. For that minute we believed the trilogy was going somewhere.
The script, also West’s, is where it goes wrong. It is a list of appointments. Detective Williams (Michelle Monaghan) and Detective Torres (Bobby Cannavale) turn up after each body, exchange a page of dialogue, and leave. Debicki’s director gets two speeches about making something respectable out of cheap material, which is the film describing itself, and is then largely put away. Giancarlo Esposito plays Maxine’s agent, Teddy Knight, with a suit and a smile both a size too large, and he is fun. Bacon is more than fun: a wheedling drawl, a nose that looks as if it has been broken by professionals, a man who enjoys being disliked. We laughed at him every time he appeared, and somewhere in the second act we noticed we were laughing at the villain and afraid of nobody.
That is the fault. It is a slasher that does not frighten. The killings happen to people we have met for one scene, and they happen quickly, at a distance or in cutaway, so there is a good deal of blood and no dread at all. West edits his own films, and here he cuts between four strands, the production, the police, the investigator and the killer, without letting any of them run long enough to build. The second half takes a turn we will not describe, except to say that we had guessed it in the first act and the film presents it as a revelation. By the last twenty minutes we were not angry, which would at least have been a feeling. We were checking how much was left.
Against the two earlier films it comes off badly. X (2022) was one farmhouse, one night and a handful of people, and the small space kept it tight. Pearl (2022) was one woman in one bright frame and gave Goth a whole film to carry, which she did. MaXXXine has the whole of Los Angeles and uses it as a set of references, and it gives Goth less to do than either: things happen to Maxine for most of the running time and she responds to them late. The tagline says Hollywood is a killer. The film agrees and has nothing further to add.
If you saw the first two you will want to see how it ends, and you should, at home, where the neon survives and the thinness is easier to forgive. If you did not, start with Pearl. It runs 103 minutes and carries an 18, most of which is blood and little of which is fear.
